Judge Faults U.S. for Holding Immigrant Defendants Freed on Bail

[Borealis]

[URL]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/07/nyregion/immigrants-bail.html?ribbon-ad-idx=3&rref=nyregion[/URL]

[QUOTE]In mid-October, Keston Lett arrived at Kennedy Airport on a JetBlue flight from his home in Trinidad and Tobago. As Mr. Lett was passing through customs, a border agent caught a strong odor coming from his bag and noticed that its bottom “was unusually thick and heavy,” court papers say.

The agent tested the bag for cocaine and when the test proved positive, he opened it and found more than two kilos of the drug inside. Mr. Lett was arrested on the spot. The next day, he appeared in Federal District Court in Brooklyn where he was charged with importing drugs into the country.

While it is hardly unusual for customs officials to nab drug suspects at New York’s airports, what happened next not only broke the law, his lawyer says, but also seemed in keeping with a recent shift in immigration policy that a federal judge in Brooklyn has complained of twice in separate cases in the last three months.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Lett was freed from the custody of the Brooklyn court and was supposed to be released on a $30,000 bond to his aunt’s house in New Jersey. He never made it. Instead, court papers say, he was rearrested on an immigration detainer and sent to an immigration detention center at the Hudson County Correctional Facility in Kearny, N.J.

According to both Mr. Lett’s lawyer and the judge, Dora L. Irizarry, the government cannot decide to criminally prosecute immigrants and then keep them locked up on immigration detainers, if, as their cases proceed, they are granted bail. To do so, they said, was to take what amounted to a second bite of the apple, one that skirted the constitutional protections of the criminal-justice system by using the separate immigration process to obtain a result they failed to get the first time.
[URL="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/07/nyregion/immigrants-bail.html?ribbon-ad-idx=3&rref=nyregion#story-continues-2"]Continue reading the main story[/URL]

“The executive branch has a choice to make,” the lawyer, Michelle Gelernt, wrote last week in a motion to dismiss Mr. Lett’s charges. “Whether to proceed with the criminal case against Mr. Lett or whether to proceed instead with his removal.”

“What the executive branch cannot do,” Ms. Gelernt said, “is to use its immigration authority to detain Mr. Lett while pursuing its criminal case against him.”[/QUOTE]

[ScottHarvey77]

Christ, what a headache.